It has been an inarguable truth over the ages that pirates are cool. As far back as the 1700’s, authors have been writing about and romanticizing the lives of those who sailed the seven seas. Here’s a list of books on pirates and piracy, fiction and nonfiction, new and old. I even threw in a few at the end for those digital pirates out there.

Red Rover(insideSea Tales), by James Fenimore Cooper. Cooper’s iconic style from Last of the Mohicans, but with pirates on the open ocean instead of Native Americans in the forests.

Master and Commander, by Patrick O’Brian – The first of several novels detailing the friendship of Captain Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, the ship’s surgeon, as they sail in service of the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. Contains some very detailed descriptions of life aboard a man-of-war.

Crossbones, by Nuruddin Farah. Over a dozen years after leaving, two brothers return home to Puntland, the region of Somalia notorious as being a pirate hideout. Things are not as they remember them to be.

June 2009: Facebook encourages underground opposition groups in Iran to use Facebook as an organizing tool.
December 2009: Facebook changes its privacy policy with no warning. Sections of Facebook that were now private (friend list, groups, etc) no longer even have that option. The Iranian government uses this information to find and arrest political prisoners.

That’s all for now. Make sure to check back for more recommendations. Or just stop in and ask in person!